GNOME as the default desktop (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Minutes - 2010-12-06)

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Mittwoch, den 15.12.2010, 17:31 -0500 schrieb Bill Nottingham:
> Christoph Wickert (christoph.wickert at googlemail.com) said: 
> > Am Mittwoch, den 15.12.2010, 16:13 -0500 schrieb Bill Nottingham:
> > > Christoph Wickert (christoph.wickert at googlemail.com) said: 
> > > >       * Removal of the notification area which and the resulting API
> > > >         changes in libnotify 0.7.0 breaks all other desktop bug
> > > >         gnome-shell.
> > > 
> > > You could certainly package libnotify06 if you really want; it shouldn't
> > > be that complicated.
> > 
> > I could have done that if I had the time to do it and if the libnotify
> > maintainer *properly* announced that change in advance.
> 
> It was announced beforehand, with roughly the same delay that most other
> announcements are done, with examples of the API changes, pointers to
> example patches, and test patches.

I agree the "announcement" contained valuable information, however the
delay was way too short. The announcement was sent Monday, 02 Nov 2010
02:12:47 and mentioned "the end of the week", however the package was
already built on Wednesday 03 Nov at 11:10:32. 31 hours during the
working week is too short for breaking over 100 dependent packages,
especially given the fact that many of our contributors do have a dayjob
and don't happen to work for Red Hat like the GNOME developers in
question.

It is a good example of how the desktop SIG operates. They do amazing
code and make things happen, but they are doing it on the cost of
others. I whish there was more communication, e.g. the announcement
happened on fedora-devel-announce instead of fedora-devel where people
miss it due to the noise.

> And as for time to do it...
> 
> Script started on Wed 15 Dec 2010 05:06:39 PM EST

[snipped]
 
> +# This will be in the main libnotify package.
> +rm -f $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_bindir}/notify-send

So I have to install libnotify again to get notify-send? Did you check
if notify-send is still compatible?

[snipped again]

> Script done on Wed 15 Dec 2010 05:18:57 PM EST

Did your script also does a package review? ;)

> > Even if I did I
> > doubt it would be possible to build against libnotify06 because
> > libnotify will be pulled in by the massive dependency chain, will be
> > found first and likely make builds fail.
> 
> You'd have to require the right version, and possibly patch a few
> configure scripts. Again, not hard, and sort of part and parcel of staying
> on non-default versions of libraries.

What if something else in the dependency chain already requires
libnotify?

Regards,
Christoph